I’ve recently been converted.

No, I’m not talking about religion here. (Who knows why I would ever want to blog about religion, anyway!) I’m actually talking about something much more relevant to most of us in this day and age: e-mail.

I’m sure that many and relate themselves to me when I talk about how, during the past school year, I really didn’t do much to keep my e-mail under control, and I found myself having an inbox full of stuff dating all the way back to last September. By the end of June, I had over 1500 messages in my inbox, and I didn’t even remember what most of it was.

Well, one of my goals this summer was to get my life better organized (both in the real world and the computer world), and e-mail was certainly a major target for getting my life back in order. And lo and behold, I found my inspiration in the July 2008 issue of Macworld, which featured a three-part article by Joe Kissell called Empty Your Inbox (part 1, part 2, part 3), which was heavily based on the Inbox Zero philosophy by Merlin Mann. I delved into the Macworld article, Merlin’s video presentation and Merlin’s own set of blog articles surrounding this novel idea of getting your inbox down to nothing.

And after reading and watching, surprising as though it may seem, I’ve successfully implemented Inbox Zero into my life this past month, and now could hardly imagine going back to letting my inbox fill up. (I’m still going through the last few transitional growing pains of adjusting to a new paradigm for my e-mail, but a lot of this stuff is finally starting to become instinctive.)

While you can go check out this info for yourself, here’s my summary of what Inbox Zero is all about, and how it works.

The Paradigm Shift: You Do NOT Live in Your E-mail
Try repeating that a couple of times to yourself: “I do NOT live in my e-mail.” This requires you learn to not lean on e-mail so much and to try standing up without the walking stick a bit more. You have to learn that you don’t need to have everything in your life come to you in an e-mail. You shouldn’t have to use your e-mail inbox to decide what you’re going to do in the day, nor should you have to e-mail yourself reminders of things that you want to do. There are ways you can simplify this whole process which I’ll go through, but in my experience, you can’t start doing any of that until you start training your mind that your e-mail life doesn’t have to be as complicated as it has been, and only then will you be ready to let go of your old habits and start developing new ones. (Man, this stuff sounds so much like Zen, eh?)

Turn Down the Volume!
Part 1 of the Macworld series is entirely devoted to this idea that one of the ways you can make your e-mail life more bearable is to do some things to turn down the load of incoming e-mails. From getting a good spam filter to opting out of e-mails from companies/websites that you don’t care about to using another tool like IM or Skype or something like that, for example, there are ways that you can take some of the burden off of your inbox. Does it eliminate the problem? No, but it’s a start.

Delete. Delete, delete, delete.
You know, since I started adopting Inbox Zero, it’s amazing how much more frequently I’m hitting the delete key to get rid of e-mails. Merlin Mann calls it “Fail faster.” When you go through new e-mail, you need to make a decision about what you need to do with it. Is it just information that you need to read and then you’re never going to need the e-mail again? Delete it. Is it a task that you can do quickly, right now? Do it, then delete the e-mail. Does it just need a quick reply? Write the reply, then delete it. If it’s something that requires some longer step, then you should either delegate it to someone else (if necessary) or defer it later to some time that you can actually deal with it (more on that below). If you really, really feel like this is an e-mail that you might have to take a look at later, then okay, you can archive it into a special Archive folder or something. But what’s the difference between deleting an e-mail now or letting it sit in your inbox, thinking that it has some sort of magical genie that will be useful to you soon, but then having it clog up your inbox for six months until you finally, reluctantly, delete it? This is the hardest skill to master in Inbox Zero, but once you master it, it’s amazing how instinctive it becomes.

Organizing Your Deferred E-mail: Your New Filing System
Different e-mails have different priorities and require different amounts of attention, but when you let all of your e-mail accumulate in your inbox, these e-mails requiring different priorities are all sitting in the same bucket! Not-so-important e-mails get in your face and can cause very important e-mails to slip by. That’s why the concept of Mailboxes were invented, so that we could get e-mails out of the inbox and organize them. For many people, this means adding mailboxes to cover every kind of category that their e-mail could somewhat fit into, but for most people, that leads to even more havoc. They have too many mailboxes, making it hard to find their e-mails, and when new e-mail comes in, they spend all their time trying to decide which mailbox the message should go to! Besides that, nowadays we have this phenomenon called “Search,” so there’s really no need to over-categorize your messages!
Part 2 of Macworld’s series offers a good starting point for a basic organization system. They recommend that you create three mailboxes: Filed, Action, and Later. Filed is for anything that you’re finished with but want to keep for reference (i.e. messages that you’ve chosen to archive instead of delete). Action is for messages that require you to do something with them at your next opportunity, and Later is for low-priority messages that you will take a closer look at when you have free time. Of course, as you start adopting your own e-mail habits, you can amend these as you wish.
My personal system looks like this. I have four organizational mailboxes–the three that I just mentioned, plus an additional “Awaiting Response” mailbox where I store messages that are pending some kind of response from another person/other people before I can do anything with them. I keep these four as sub-mailboxes within a master “Mailboxes” mailbox, for organizational purposes. In addition, I also have separate mailboxes for the mailing lists that I subscribe to, and I have setup Rules for Mail which automatically direct messages from those lists in there. And finally, I have a Messages to Save mailbox (a leftover from my original “organization system”) which contains a few messages which I need to have handy on the tips of my fingers in case they become necessary (though frankly, I should probably move a lot of that info into a 1Password note or something), and a Receipts mailbox to save receipts that I get from online purchases.

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Process to Zero: Electronic Triage
So how do you make these mailboxes work for you? And how exactly do you empty your inbox? Well, the meaning of your inbox now takes on a complete redefinition: it’s no longer the thing that holds all of your e-mail, it’s the place where e-mail that you have not yet looked at comes in, waiting for you to process it. Note that processing is different than responding; just because you have to process 50 new e-mails that come into your inbox does not mean you have to respond to 50 new e-mails. Tackle/respond e-mails that require something to be done quickly, right on the spot, and then delete the e-mail that will no longer matter to you (or move it into your Filed mailbox if you prefer). Move e-mail that is low priority into that Later mailbox, and e-mail that requires you to do something (but you don’t quite have time to do it right now) should be moved into your Action mailbox. By processing your e-mails in this way, you’ll find that your inbox goes down to zero, and stays that way.
However, remember that you can’t just shift the burden over to those other mailboxes and let things sit in there. Make time available for you to process your mailboxes as well. Messages in your Action mailbox are things that you put there because they’re things that you need to do (likely in a timely fashion), so do them, and try to empty down your Action mailbox as well. Make time to review those messages that you sent to the Later mailbox; they may have been low-priority when you sent them there, but are they still low-priority now? Is it time to act on them, or at least move them to a more appropriate mailbox? If you’re like me and have a mailbox for messages that are awaiting a response, did you ever get a response? Should these messages be moved back into Action, or perhaps the conversation is dead and it’s okay to file or delete them? And be sure to go through your Filed mailbox occasionally (though not as frequently as the others) to see if there isn’t any e-mail that you can go ahead and delete now. E-mail doesn’t tend to age as well as scotch does, so those messages that you decided to keep in the archive a month or two ago may no longer be important to you, so delete it!

Take Advantage of Other Tools
There are people who use e-mail as a to-do list, a calendar, and other things. And I’m not talking about the To-Dos feature in Mail or the built-in calendar in Entourage, I’m talking about people who scroll through their inbox and use messages to determine what’s happening when and what things they need to get done. One of the best ways to empty your inbox is to start taking advantage of other tools. If you’re using Mail, it has this great, subtly-known feature called Data Detectors that’s quite awesome and allows you to quickly add contact info to Address Book and events to iCal. Adding events to iCal is really the bit that’s nice here–just hover over a bit of date/time information, and you’ll see a little down-arrow fade in to the right of your mouse. Click on that and choose to create a new event–a new event pop-up similar to iCal’s will show up and auto-fill with as much info about the event as mail can interpret. Once it’s added to your iCal calendar, the event will include a link that will find the e-mail message in Mail and open it up for you. Next time you get an invitation to an upcoming event, just quickly add it to iCal using Data Detectors and file it. (Gmail users have a similar feature available in connection with Google Calendar.) Similarly, start a to-do list. If you’re just looking for a basic to-do list, you can use the one that Mail and iCal use, and easily add to-dos from within Mail by highlighting text in your e-mail and clicking on To-Do, and Mail will add a to-do that’s linked to your e-mail. If you want a more advanced to-do system, try OmniFocus, which has a Clippings feature that similarly allows you to add an OmniFocus action that can embed the contents of an e-mail with it. Merlin Mann has a nice demo of this.
The whole point is that your inbox shouldn’t be a repository of everything you need to do in your life, there are other tools available that are much more suitable for helping you with those goals.

Do E-mail Less
Finally, the last piece of advice is that it’s okay to do e-mail less. Don’t overwhelm yourself with e-mail by having Mail autocheck every minute, check every half hour, or every hour, or every fifteen minutes–your choice. Trying to get some work done? Quit Mail, it’s okay. Granted, if you work in customer support or some part of the government on high alert in case a nuclear warhead is heading towards the country, you can’t do this, but for 98% of e-mailers, it’s okay to let e-mail accumulate a bit. It gives yourself more time to actually get things done. Same goes for RSS feeds. Personally, I’ve reduced the auto-checking time of Twitterrific to 5 minutes, Mail to 30 minutes, and NewsFire to 60 minutes, and I’m finding that the level of distractions has been significantly reduced in my life.

So that’s my look at the Inbox Zero philosophy, and it’s certainly had quite an effect on my life. But don’t just take my words for it, go delve into it for yourself. Be sure to watch the presentation that Merlin gave to Google (it claims to be 58 minutes, but it’s really just half an hour, the rest is all Q&A), read the Macworld feature, and even check out some of Merlin’s Inbox Zero blog posts if you’re interested, and consider giving this system a try.

Tags: data detectors, e-mail, inbox, Inbox Zero, Macworld, Mail, Merlin Mann, OmniFocus, organization